Vaguely

Do you remember life before the internet?

I had my first dial-up connection when I was a freshman in high school, which would have made me 15 years old. So, I have a ton of memories before the Internet. The problem is that I am 46 now and they are hard to access. They’re still there. They’ve just been replaced by memes that go back a lot further than they do for other people. You have to be of a certain age to get “Homestar Runner.” And that’s just one Flash cartoon. The Internet was littered with stuff like that. Search algorithms have just made them easier to find.

That’s the biggest improvement to my daily life that I can remember since the internet was invented, and it was backwards compatible. Once Yahoo and Google and all that made it where you could search the web, Apple and Windows were forced to adopt it for their operating systems because it was a no brainer to let people search their own files the way they’d google something.

Where Windows is flawed, and because I’m IT I realize this is entirely my fault, is not remembering what you named the file. I have spent hours with angry people who are infuriated I’m so stupid and come to find out, it’s that the file name contained exactly zero of the characters they said it did. After hours of anger, you don’t get an apology. You get sulking because they’ve just realized they’re an idiot and they don’t know what to say, so they just keep treating you like shit out of habit.

The Internet coming into my life hasn’t always been a good thing, and users, I have to say that’s on you. Because I soaked up the Internet and how it worked quickly, I had a lot of people who asked me for help and fought with me the entire way. I was not the personality then that I am now, and I have taken a lot of bad behavior from people who could have learned a lot from me.

But when you’ve made a mistake with your computer, you’re embarrassed that you look like a dumbass and don’t realize that the difference between me and you is that I’ve made that mistake before and this is your first time.

Before Google, learning how to work on computers was working on them until they broke, then next time, not doing whatever the thing it was that broke it. For instance, my friend Joe and I tried overclocking my Pentium and set the motherboard on fire. You know what we did? We got out a spare motherboard and just kept trucking….. and the new motherboard was better than the old one because if you’re truly interested in computers, you’ve probably got parts sitting around. Basically, my computer was about the same age as Joe’s hand-me-downs, so he was able to fix what he broke without buying anything. By the time I left that morning (we’d stayed up all night) I had a fully functioning PC with Linux and the Enlightenment desktop.

Fixing our computers together is probably the thing I miss the most about the Internet. We don’t have to fix our computers in groups anymore. Everyone has the answer on their phones, and is offended if you ask easily Googlable questions. Nothing ever deserves a human touch. But it’s the conversation behind it that matters….. like, “I wouldn’t go that way. Water cooling is always more trouble than it’s worth.” Of course you can research air cooled vs. water cooled PCs online, but you don’t get the joy of talking to people about it and hearing their real life experiences.

I find that when I want to go back to my life without the Internet, there are two things that drive me. The first is reddit, because it’s the closest thing to what life was like when the Internet started. I can have those long, drawn out technology conversations if I want because that’s what it’s for. Walk into any tech subreddit and you’ll meet millions of people who sound just like me.

Caveat Emptor.

The second is books by Jonna and Tony Mendez. I feel like I got to relive my life without the Internet through those books, because when I was a child, Tony and Jonna were real people living out in the world. I mention this because my special interest used to be hacktivism. Going back to basic HUMINT and tradecraft was really fun for a geek like me. Like, how would I get information if everything at my fingertips was gone? I have picked up a surprising amount in terms of reading people…. paying attention to body language and microaggressions is as important as speech pattern and word meaning. I’ve known this since childhood. I didn’t know it was a skill and most people don’t do that. For future reference, I do that. People don’t get away with much around me, I’m just not often brave enough to call them on it in the moment.

People think I talk about all this stuff for nefarious reasons…. reading people…. who does that?

The kind of person who can tell the difference between “I’m fine” and “I’m pretending for the purposes of this party that I’m fine.”

All of that has been taken away by the Internet to mixed results.

Caveat Emptor.